The developmental trajectory of attentional orienting to socio-biological cues.

It has been proposed that the orienting of attention in the same direction as another’s point of gaze relies on innate brain mechanisms which are present from birth, but direct evidence relating to the influence of eye gaze cues on attentional orienting in young children is limited. In two experiments, 137 children aged 3–10 years old performed an adapted pro-saccade task with centrally presented uninformative eye gaze, finger pointing and arrow pre-cues which were either congruent or incongruent with the direction of target presentations. When the central cue overlapped with presentation of the peripheral target (Experiment 1), children up to 5 years old had difficulty disengaging fixation from central fixation in order to saccade to the target. This effect was found to be particularly marked for eye gaze cues. When central cues were extinguished simultaneously with peripheral target onset (Experiment 2), this effect was greatly reduced. In both experiments finger pointing cues (image of pointing index finger presented at fixation) exerted a strong influence on saccade reaction time to the peripheral stimulus for the youngest group of children (<5 years). Overall the results suggest that although young children are strongly engaged by centrally presented eye gaze cues, the directional influence of such cues on overt attentional orienting is only present in older children, meaning that the effect is unlikely to be dependent upon an innate brain module. Instead, the results are consistent with the existence of stimulus–response associations which develop with age and environmental experience

Visual exploration pattern in hemineglect

The analysis of eye movement parameters in visual neglect such as cumulative fixation duration, saccade amplitude, or the numbers of saccades has been used to probe attention deficits in neglect patients, since the pattern of exploratory eye movements has been taken as a strong index of attention distribution. The current overview of the literature of visual neglect has its emphasis on studies dealing with eye movement and exploration analysis. We present our own results in 15 neglect patients. The free exploration behavior was analyzed in these patients presenting 32 naturalistic color photographs of everyday scenes. Cumulative fixation duration, spatial distribution of fixations in the horizontal and vertical plane, the number and amplitude of exploratory saccades was analyzed and compared with the results of an age-matched control group. A main result of our study was that in neglect patients, fixation distribution of free exploration of natural scenes is not only influenced by the left-right bias in the horizontal direction but also by the vertical direction